Public Opinion - Presidential powers

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Aside from participating in the development of a climate of opinion and
possessing a latent electoral veto over major foreign policy
decisions—two not insignificant functions—the
public's direct influence in the making of foreign policy is
minimal. Here, more than in domestic affairs, presidents are dominant over
both Congress and the mass public. Their ability to create opinion and
dominate the opposition assures them a relatively free hand in planning
and executing foreign policies.

Because of the vast information-gathering and information-disseminating
facilities at their disposal and because they are the only truly national
spokespersons, presidents are the most important source of information on
foreign affairs. Through their public attention to specific international
problems, they can go a long way toward determining the agenda of the
national foreign policy debate. Although congressional committees and the
mass media have developed their own informational and promotional
capabilities, until recently they have not commanded the resources
available to the president. It was only during the last decade of the
twentieth century that round-the-clock cable television news and Internet
sources, available everywhere around the world, began to level the
information and propaganda playing fields.

The president's ability to conduct day-to-day diplomacy, free from
public pressures, rests on the fact that most Americans are not very
interested in esoteric international issues. Naturally, some obscure
policies that the public does not care to monitor eventually become major
issues. One such example was the unpublicized U.S. assistance to forces
opposing Salvador Allende's socialist regime in Chile during the
early 1970s.

If presidents' freedom of action in the development of foreign
policy depends in good measure upon public inattention, their power in a
crisis depends upon public helplessness. During sudden crises citizens
must accept their accounts of fast-breaking events or risk further loss of
American lives. In May 1846, Americans had no option but to accept
President Polk's misleading account of the way American blood had
been shed on American soil by Mexican soldiers. Given the apparent need
for immediate retaliation and Polk's relative credibility, the
public rallied behind his policies and asked questions later. In similar
situations Americans supported their leaders during the Korean crisis in
the summer of 1950 and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964.
Surprisingly, the public does not always withdraw its support when crisis
diplomacy or military intervention fails. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in
April 1961, John F. Kennedy's popularity rose in the polls, as did
Jimmy Carter's after the failed rescue mission in Iran in April
1980.

In noncrisis periods the president can develop support for a program by
selectively suppressing or releasing secret information. Madison published
letters from a turncoat British spy in an attempt to demonstrate that
Federalists who challenged his British policies had been conspiring with
the enemy. More than a century later, Woodrow Wilson's release of
the purloined Zimmermann telegram contributed to the onrushing torrent of
anti-German sentiment on the eve of American entry into World War I.

As for the suppression of important information, Harry S. Truman decided
to withhold General Albert C. Wedemeyer's 1947 report on China
because it was potentially offensive to Jiang Jie-shī (Chiang
Kai-shek). More important, its conclusions ran counter to official
policies. From 1970 to 1973, Richard Nixon suppressed information on the
bombing of Cambodia while some of his aides participated in a cover-up
that involved falsification of military records. In one of the most
celebrated cases of all, Franklin D. Roosevelt concealed the extent of his
involvement as a silent partner in the Allied effort in World War II for
fear that such revelations might lead to his electoral defeat and a change
in the direction of national policy. His defenders contend that the
president and his advisers had a better grasp of what constituted national
security than did the well-meaning but untutored public. Like the doctor
who tells his patient that the bitter but vitally important medicine
tastes good, Roosevelt obscured the issues and misled the people for their
own alleged best interests.

Such a position might seem tenable in the light of the times, but its
acceptance as a legitimate procedure for all presidents is unlikely. Many
of those sympathizing with Roosevelt's position were displeased
when Lyndon Johnson was not entirely forthcoming with the electorate about
his plans for the war in Vietnam during the 1964 election campaign. Yet
both presidents later cited national security in defense of their tactics.

Conceivably, an alert, crusading press can counterbalance the awesome
power of the president to mold foreign policy opinions. However, editors
move with caution when it comes to printing material potentially
detrimental to national security. The
New York Times
learned of the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation on the eve of the attack. After
conferring with the White House, its editors decided not to run the story
because they were convinced that the success of that covert operation was
a matter of the highest national interest. In a related vein, when
columnist Jack Anderson published excerpts from the minutes of the
National Security Council during the Bangladesh war of 1971, many
reporters joined with the government to criticize his
"impropriety." Nixon's aides went beyond mere
criticism as they contemplated ways to do away with the columnist who told
Americans that contrary to what the White House was saying, the
administration was supporting the rapists of West Pakistan against the
freedom fighters in East Pakistan.

In general, the press has been far more circumspect in printing diplomatic
than domestic exclusives. For journalists, it is one thing to uncover
scandals and quite another to publish material that could render aid and
comfort to a foreign enemy. Since the 1990s, however, unaffiliated
investigative reporters on the Internet have not been so circumspect.

Despite their general mastery of the opinion problem, American leaders
have traditionally claimed that the people are important to them as a
source of support and inspiration. Since the Jacksonian period, most have
probably believed that they were duty-bound to heed the people. Thus, they
have constantly attempted to assess public opinion, or at least the
opinions of relevant publics. Of course, the opinion evaluated and used by
decision makers does not always meet the social scientists'
definition of public opinion.

Public officials have traditionally relied heavily upon newspapers and
other mass media to discover what people are thinking about. The media,
however, are better indicators of the topics in the current foreign policy
debate than of the range of opinions on those topics. Despite charges
about the biases of the "liberal press," most U.S.
newspapers have been owned by Republicans who fill their editorial pages
with materials that do not always represent majority opinion in their
communities.

Many leaders consider newspaper and magazine columnists to be peers whose
approval they covet. Occasionally, they use friendly journalists to float
trial balloons for them, so that they can test the political waters before
committing themselves to a new course. In some cases columnists may become
directly enmeshed in the policy process. In the fall of 1962, Walter
Lippmann proposed the dismantling of U.S. missile bases in Turkey as a
quid pro quo for the dismantling of Russian bases in Cuba. Nikita
Khrushchev mistakenly interpreted the trade-off presented by
America's most distinguished columnist as a cue from the White
House. This misunderstanding about the nature of Lippmann's
relationship to the inner circles of the Kennedy administration
contributed to the tension during the Cuban missile crisis. Moscow may
have been confused by the fact that the Americans were using John Scali, a
television journalist, as an unofficial go-between with one of their
diplomats during the affair.

Congress has been the policymakers' second most important source
for public opinion. Primarily, they are concerned about the activities of
committees with interests in foreign affairs, but they also view senators
and representatives as reflecting constituents' interests. From
time to time such an interpretation of opinion on Capitol Hill has
affected policy outcomes. During the late 1930s, President Roosevelt may
have underestimated the public's interventionist sentiment when he
treated congressional isolationism as an accurate reflection of the
national mood. Today, social scientists suggest that though legislators
may reflect the majority opinion in their respective districts on domestic
issues, they frequently support foreign policies that run counter to their
constituents' preferences. In part, they tend to vote their
consciences or party lines on international issues because foreign policy
is not important to their constituents. In most cases, members of Congress
will be neither rewarded nor punished for their endeavors in the
international sphere.

Even when they attempt to reflect faithfully their districts'
foreign policy attitudes, the aggregation of their views is not always an
accurate reflection of national public opinion. After all, there is no
guarantee that national opinion leaders, to whom the president looks for
guidance, will share the opinions of local leaders to whom legislators may
listen.

During the first twenty years of the Cold War, the handful of
congressional critics of presidential foreign policy on both sides of the
aisle was not influential. The concept of bipartisanship meant that the
opposition was expected to approve executive programs while the president
went through the motions of prior consultation. As a product in part of
the Vietnam War, in the late 1960s, Congress began to flex its
long-atrophied muscles and offer programs and ideas independent of the
president and, to some degree, more representative of the range of
opinions in the country.

Since the 1930s, policymakers have employed polls as a third indicator of
opinion. Even the best of them, however, are not always reliable,
especially when they attempt to elicit opinions on foreign affairs. Survey
instruments do not lend themselves to sophisticated treatment of such
questions and, moreover, rarely cover enough contingencies to be of
immediate use to decision makers. During the months before the attack on
Pearl Harbor, a majority of those polled thought that the United States
would go to war in the near future and recommended such a course if it
appeared that England was about to go under. But up to December 1941, only
a very small minority told interviewers that they favored an immediate
declaration of war. It is impossible to determine on the basis of these
data how Americans would have responded to a presidential request for war
in the absence of a direct attack on U.S. territory. In addition, some
polls are worded so ambiguously that antagonists derive support from the
same poll. So it was during the 1960s, when hawks and doves often utilized
the same poll to prove that they spoke for the majority concerning the
Vietnam involvement. During the last decade of the twentieth century,
particularly during the administration of Bill Clinton, policymakers used
their own sophisticated polling techniques and focus groups to see how
various foreign initiatives might be received by the public. This reliance
on first trying out foreign policies on focus groups drew a good deal of
criticism during the presidential campaign in 2000 from those who argued
that presidents must do what they think is right without checking the
nation's pulse and then lead the public to accept their policies.

Phone calls, mail and e-mail, telegrams, and faxes received by the White
House and other executive branches represent a fourth source of
information about public opinion for the president. Modern administrations
keep careful count of the weekly "scores" on specific
issues, paying attention to communication that does not appear to be
mass-produced by a lobby or political organization. Presidents view
significant changes in the direction of opinion or in the number of
complaints or commendations on an issue as possibly representing shifts in
national public opinion, even though they understand that their sample is
very small and hardly a random one. When the mail flow is going their way,
presidents often trumpet the news, hoping to affect those who did not
write in to climb aboard the bandwagon. Richard Nixon took this part of
the activity so seriously that he organized secret Republican operatives
around the country to send in supportive letters and telegrams on demand
after a speech or a foreign policy initiative.

Last, and most important, politicians claim they have developed finely
tuned antennae that enable them to "sense" public opinion.
Through an unscientific sampling of opinion from newspapers, Congress, and
the polls, and from talking to family members, friends, advisers, and
influential leaders, they contend that they can accurately read public
opinion on any major issue. Harry Truman told his friends that the polls
were wrong in 1948. As he traveled across the nation, he sensed a swing to
the Democrats that did not show up in the polls.

To some degree Truman's faith in his political intuition was
warranted. Social scientists report that leaders of small groups are
better able to assess the range of opinion in their groups than other
members are, and, in fact, their rise to leadership status may relate to
their superior ability to assess group opinion.

Nevertheless, the politicians' antennae sometimes pick up only
opinions that conform to their preconceived notions. Thus, when William
McKinley toured the country in 1898 to determine what Americans thought of
expansion, he apparently saw and heard only those who favored acquisition
of the Philippines. In a slightly different case in the fall of 1937,
Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly proposed that the United States begin to
take a more active role in curbing expansionists in Asia and Europe.
According to most opinion indicators available today, a majority of
Americans supported his bold quarantine speech. However, before the fact,
the president had convinced himself that his remarks would launch a storm
of isolationist protest. Consequently, after scanning the newspapers,
telegrams, and letters, he found more opposition than was merited by the
empirical data. It is irrelevant to students of the foreign policy process
that presidents and their advisers often assess public opinion in an
unscientific manner and confuse opinions stated publicly with public
opinion. When officials act on the basis of an inaccurate reading of
opinion, the opinions they hear represent effective public opinion.
Naturally, this might indicate that they use public opinion to rationalize
or justify a course already decided upon.

The public is usually most important to the decision maker after a major
policy has been implemented. At that point, dissenters who challenge both
the legitimacy of the policy and presidential authority may be heard. In
most cases, presidents have been able to cope with those who oppose their
foreign programs. When they are confronted with some negative and little
positive reaction to a policy, they can argue that the absence of
widespread dissent is the same as tacit support—the silent majority
assents by remaining silent. When the ranks of the dissenters swell in
Congress and in the media, presidents can dismiss them as partisans who
sacrifice national security for political gain. When, as in the 1960s,
hundreds of thousands of dissenters march on Washington and support
moratoriums, presidents can call attention to the 250 million who stay
home. Most citizens would never think of protesting publicly or marching
in open opposition to an official foreign policy. Such behavior appears
unpatriotic, especially when it is confounded by officials and the media,
sometimes purposely, with the scattered violence and revolutionary
rhetoric present on the fringes of contemporary mass protests.

In general, presidents can secure their positions by assailing critics for
their irresponsibility—they do not know what the presidents know,
nor do they have access to the intelligence reports that flow across a
president's desk. Furthermore, critics lack knowledge of the
intricate linkages between all diplomatic activities from Asia to Latin
America. However, this line of argumentation lost some of its power after
the 1970s. Many of the more sensational revelations contained in the
Pentagon Papers
merely documented rumors and leaks that perceptive citizens gleaned from
fragmentary accounts in the media during the 1960s. The spirited public
debates over the wisdom of intervention in Vietnam demonstrated that
critics in the opposition often have as accurate intelligence and
knowledge about the issues as those in the White House.

In the last analysis, presidents can usually contain their critics because
they hold the office of president, the most visible symbol of the American
nation. Many who may privately express skepticism about certain foreign
policies are reluctant to speak up for fear of insulting the dignity of
the presidency and, perhaps, the prestige of the United States in the
international arena.

The power of the president to mold opinion has been enhanced in the
twentieth century by electronic media. During much of American history,
national leaders encountered difficulties when they tried to appeal to the
mass public. In the 1840s, James K. Polk threatened to "go to the
people" whenever Congress challenged him. His threat, however,
lacked credibility because he did not possess the physical means to reach
them. Almost seventy-five years later, Woodrow Wilson might have succeeded
in developing irresistible public pressure for his League of Nations had
national radio hookups been available.

In the 1920s radio began to play an important role in the political life
of the nation. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a consummate master of the new
medium, increased his popular support through frequent direct contact with
the public. Television, in the right hands, is an even more powerful tool
than radio. During the period following World War II, Americans began to
suffer from information overload, a condition brought on by constant
bombardment with all sorts of material on complex problems. This condition
can produce both frustration and confusion. It is only natural, therefore,
that Americans turn to the president for relief; he appears on television
as a reassuring father figure to simplify reality and ease anxiety. During
most of the post–World War II era, contemporary presidents enjoyed
easy access to the airwaves. Even when network executives were skeptical
about the importance of a presidential speech or a press conference, they
could not resist White House demands for free airtime. According to the
journalist Tom Wicker, writing in October 1974:

This is a Presidential "power" that no one wrote into the
Constitution, or even "implied" in that document….
It is the power to command a vast audience almost at will, and to appear
before that audience in all the impressive roles a President can
play—from manager of the economy to Commander in Chief….
This "power"…gives a President an enormous
advantage over his political opposition, as well as over the other
branches of government, in molding opinion. It magnifies a thousandfold
what Theodore Roosevelt, long before television, called the
"bully pulpit" of the Presidency.

Naturally, after presidents lose credibility, even the cleverest
television and media experts are unable to help them regain their
audiences. And with the advent of cable television, which meant that
Americans could view scores of stations, the major networks began to
refuse to carry many presidential appearances, arguing that interested
viewers could always find the president on a public-service channel.

Presidents have been assisted by agencies and departments of the executive
branch in their dealings with the public. The Department of State has
assumed the major responsibility in foreign affairs. Through the years it
has been more interested in information and lobbying functions than in
survey research. In 1909, Secretary of State Philander C. Knox established
the Division of Information, which was responsible for placing news
releases into newspapers and other information channels. In 1934 the
department became especially active when it launched a lobbying campaign
to assist passage of Secretary of State Cordell Hull's Reciprocal
Trade Agreements Act. During World War II, the department began
systematically to survey the press and to provide opinion studies to
foreign service officers. In 1944 all of its information functions were
placed under an assistant secretary for public affairs. During the Cold
War, the promotional aspects of the department's work with the
public were expanded through liaison with such influential private foreign
policy groups as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy
Association.

The government has had one unfortunate experience with a formal propaganda
agency. The Committee on Public Information (also known as the Creel
Committee), operating during World War I, angered legislators and other
influential leaders because of the methods it used to sell the war effort
to Americans. When the Office of War Information was established during
World War II, Congress explicitly prohibited domestic propaganda work. The
United States Information Agency and the Voice of America are similarly
banned from operating in the United States.